Pinney's research has a strong geographic focus in central India: initial ethnographic research was concerned with village-resident factory workers. Subsequently he researched popular photographic practices and the consumption of Hindu chromolithographs in the same area. His publications combine contemporary ethnography with the historical archaeology of particular media (see eg. Camera Indica and Photos of the Gods). The Coming of Photography in India, based on the Panizzi Lectures was published by the British Library in October 2008.

He is currently interested in cultural spaces which conventional social theory has tended to neglect: “more than local and less than global”, and spaces of cultural flow that elude the west. In addition to ongoing projects with an Indian focus (for instance, a filmic record of two central Indian Dalit intellectuals) he is also working on visual dimensions of cultural encounters from 1492 to the present, and thinking through Kracauer’s later work and the question of ‘multiple temporalities’. Current book projects include, Photography and Anthropology (forthcoming from Reaktion in April 2011), Zoom: Seeing and Believing in Colonial and Postcolonial India,Lessons From Hell (concerned with popular Indian depictions of punishment), a ‘visual history’ of modern India, and Visual Encounters.

In 2009-10 Pinney visited India for research on several occasions in connection with a British Academy funded project "Power From Below: Dalit Modes of Political Performativity" which is examining the visual ethics and politics of Dalit goddess possession. He also participated in the Kovalam Literary Festival in Kerala, conferences on Gandhi's Hind Swaraj in Mumbai and on the New Cultural History in Kolkata, and gave public lectures at the University of Hyderabad, English and Foreign Languages University (Hyderbad) and at the arts organization 1 Shanthiroad (Bangalore).

Pinney's current photographic xeno-epistemic digital-cyanotype project Notes on Indian History is an attempt to document India's colonial and postcolonial predicaments. The image below, taken at the Union Carbide plant in Bhopal in April 2010 is part of the Bhopal:Blueprint/Endplan series.

2. Blueprint: cyanotype process used in duplication of engineering and architectural plans.

The Madhya Pradesh Government official number of fatalites was 3,787. Other Indian Government agencies have since calculated the total at more than 15,000. Perhaps between 100,000 and 200,000 people still live with gas-related disabilities. The rickshaw driver who drove me to the plant (in a densely populated area, just north of the railway station) was eight on that night – 2nd/3rd December 1984 when 28 tonnes of lethal gas rolled across the centre of Bhopal. He recalled waking with excruciating pain in his eyes and being rushed to a chaotic hospital by relatives. Countless family members still live with the effects of that night.

Tank 610 - containing 42 tons of methyl isocyanate (MIC) – was rapidly filled by water late on December 2nd, causing the temperature of the tank to rise to more than 200°C.

Union Carbide downplayed the incidents of phosgene leaks (some involving fatalies) in 1981, 1982 and multiple MIC leaks in 1982, 1983 and early 1984. Indian authorities warned of the probability of a major incident from 1979 onwards. Visiting US experts in 1981 warned Union Carbide of the potential for a ‘runaway reaction’ in the MIC plant.

The MIC tank alarms had not worked for four years and there was only one manual back-up system as opposed to the four relied on in US plants. The flare tower and gas scrubber had been inoperable for five months prior to the disaster but in any event the scrubber was designed to handle only one quarter of the pressure which had built up in the tank and the tower one quarter of the volume of gas. Carbon steel valves, which corrode when in contact with acid were used to save money. Water sprays were set too low and could not reach the gas.

The US parent company (Union Carbide) argued that this was a Badiouan ‘event’ or ‘rupture’, without precedent, not easily anticipated and certainly not planned. But perhaps it had more the quality of an ‘endplan’, - a destiny born of contempt for the poor, distant, and unknown - an outcome written in the blueprints, recoverable after the event through these digital cyanotypes made in 2010.

3. Endplan: Evidence recoverable after the event and which reveals the event to be immanent in the blueprint.

Pinney made two research trips to India in 2008. In January he visited Mumbai, Madhya Pradesh, Delhi and Kolkata. In September he visited Delhi (where he lectured at Jamia Millia Islamia University, the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts, and Jawaharlal Nehru University), Madhya Pradesh, Mumbai and Bangalore (where he gave a Tenth Anniversary Lecture at the Centre for the Study of Culture and Society). In 2009 he made three visits to India to research in Madhya Pradesh (Aug-Sept), and to contribute to the Kovalam Literary festival(Oct) and a Pukar conference on Gandhi's Hind Swaraj (Dec). He also gave lectures and conference presentations at Lisbon, Open University,Cologne,Toronto, Copenhagen, Minnesota and Northwestern.

During 2007-09 he was Visiting Crowe professor in Art History at Northwestern University. He gave lectures and seminar presentations at Ohio State University, SALC at the University of Chicago, the University of Southern California, Goldsmiths, NYU, ASU (Phoenix), University of Texas at Austin, Emory, Princeton, Johns Hopkins, New School, Harvard, and Columbia. He gave conference presentations in “Authorizing Inscriptions” at the University of California Davis, in “Decentering Gazes” at the University of Vienna, in “The Aesthetics of Political Transformation in South Asia” at the University of Amsterdam, in the “Indian Cinema Symposium” at the University of Westminster, and in “Painted Photographs” organized by the Alkazi Collection of Photography at SOAS, He participated in a residential seminar “Images that Move” at the School of Advanced Research in Santa Fe, gave a plenary address at the Society for Cultural Anthropology annual meeting at Long Beach, the Annual Lecture of the Transforming Cultures Research Centre at the University of Technology Sydney, and a Nicholson lecture at the University of Chicago.

A recent Tehelka interview about his Indian research is available here and one from Outlook available here.

Time Out Mumbai and Time Out Bengaluru interviews are available here and here.

His new website makes available an expanding South Asian visual archive for researchers and teachers.

22nd April panel discussant, Palestine Film Festival, Barbican Centre, London

5th April 2012, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi "Gandhi, Camera, Action: Anna Hazare and the Media-Fold in 21st Century India"

7th March 2012, "The Civil Contract of Photography in India", India Institute, Kings College London.

7th November 2011, public lecture,National Museum of Ethnology, Osaka.

17th September 2011, "Sedimentation and Recursivity: from Dalip Singh to Anna Hazare" in workshop on Curating Indian Visual Culture (Association of Academics, Artists and Citizens for University Autonomy, Dept of Fine Arts, Sarojini Naidu School of Arts and Communication, University of Hyderabad.

12th, 13th, 14th September 2011, lectures series on "The Indian Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" at Jnanapravaha, Mumbai

2nd-4th December 2010, “India in Transit: Four vectors of photography in South Asia” conference paper at “The Itinerant Languages of Photography,” Princeton University.

17th Nov. "The Authority of the Profilmic: Indian Studio Practice and the History of Photography", LCC Elephant and Castle, Photography Archive Research Centre, 430pm, Media Block 4th Floor Meeting Room M404

29 May 2009 "Sepia Mutiny: Indian Revolutionaries Stalk the Archive". Keynote lecture at The Visual Archive: The Moving Image and Memory, CRESC, Open University http://www.cresc.ac.uk/events/forum/VisualArchive.html

12 June 2009 "Manifestation and Media: The Aesthetics of Plenitude in central India" in conference on "Trance Mediums and New Media", University of Cologne, Institute for African Studies

"Epistemo-Patrimony: Speaking and Owning in the Indian Diaspora" in special issue of Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute co-edited with Nayanika Mookherjee Aesthetics of Nations: Anthropological and Historical Approaches 2011, S192-206.

"It is a different nature which speaks to the camera': Observations on Screen Culture, Prophecy and Politics". BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies 1(2) July 2010, pp. 111-118. ISSN: 0974-9276.

"The Politics of Popular Images: From Cow Protection to M.K. Gandhi , 1890-1950",in Arvind Rajagopal (ed.) The Indian Public Sphere: Readings in Media History" Oxford University Press, Delhi, 2009, pp. 65-86 (edited excerpt from Photos of the Gods).

Commentary in James Elkins and David Morgan (eds.) Re-enchantment Routledge, New York, 2008.

“The Prosthetic Eye: Photography as Cure and Poison” in Matthew Engelke ed. The Objects of Evidence: Anthropological Approaches to the Production of Knowledge special issue of Journal of the Royal Anthropological Instititute, 14(s1), pp. s-33-46.